Singapore emerging top healthcare centre

Singapore is wooing well-to-do Indians to explore the island-state as an ideal tertiary healthcare destination. Besides being only about three to five hours away from India, its being projected as a premier healthcare centre in the Asia-Pacific region. The cost of treatment here is nearly 40 per cent less than in the US and UK, and it boasts of a vast pool of competent medical experts.

For this purpose, hospitals in the city-state are making efforts to have referral arrangements with Indian doctors and hospitals under the aegis of SingaporeMedicine.

Functioning under Singapore Tourism Board (STB), SingaporeMedicine is a multi-agency government initiative that aims to make the city-state's diagnostic and treatment facilities easily accessible to international patients.

"Our hospitals collectively have 6,000 beds. Each year more than 200,000 patients travel from around the world to Singapore for quality medical treatment in areas such as heart/ brain diseases, cancer, liver/ cord blood/ haematopoietic stem cell transplantation etc," Jeannie Lim Suet Ying, assistant director, SingaporeMedicine, said.

According to Chua Ee-Lin, manager (healthcare services), STB, hospitals have international patient services centres that provide comprehensive range of services (arrangements for appointments, admission, transport, accommodation, interpreters, etc). Ying pointed out that apart from getting medical treatment, international patients have plenty to see and do in Singapore "" sight seeing, shopping, cruise, festivals and events.

Singapore has two entities in the public sector"" the National Healthcare Group (NHG) and the Singapore Health Services (SHS)""providing one-stop tertiary healthcare services. In the private sector, there are the Parkway Group Healthcare, Raffles Medical Group, and Pacific Healthcare Holdings providing such services.

(The writer's trip to Singapore was sponsored by SingaporeMedicine)